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Shano’s Travels around Australia: Country 1

Hey, owzit garn. I’m Shane. I’ve travelled around the world twice, some places more than twice, and as of June 2011 I’m living and working in Scotland, away from Australia where I’ve lived for all but 1 to 2 years of my life.

Recently I was thinking about all the travels I’ve done around the world over the years, and I realised apart from several random stories I’ve told different people here and there and a few scattered websites I’ve posted stories on, I don’t have one place where I can present my full travel details to someone. I mean, what if I was to suddenly lose memory of all these things? What record would there be that I went here and there, did this and that?

So I’ve created this blog to try to chronicle my travels to every single country I’ve been to, partly for my own enjoyment in reminiscing, and partly for others to enjoy if they wish to do so. I thought it would be fun to read.

I’m hoping each new entry will cover a new country, in the chronological order I visited them, and I’ll try to add the most interesting things I did in each one as far as I can remember them. Some countries I’ve visited more than once so I’ll try to add info on different visits, some I will most likely go back and visit again (for example, I’ve been to Thailand 3 times, once in 2006 for just over a week, again in 2008 for just under a week, and a brief stopover in 2010), some I have no desire to ever go back to because I’ve either done everything I wanted to do there or just didn’t like the place enough to go back again.
I don’t know how long I’ll keep interest in putting these blog entries together and whatnot, I don’t know if I’ll add to them later or what, but it’s a good idea for now, yeh? Alright, sweet.

While I was born in Australia, technically it was also the first country I travelled around. I have met foreigners who have been all up and down the east coast and have seen more of my home country than I have, but I’ve also met people who have never even left their own neighbourhood (and some that never desire to).
I’ve travelled with family members on holidays to within a few hours of Sydney, but I’m not sure if I can pinpoint the moment I decided to venture out alone. I took a job in a ski resort far from home in 1998, but apart from that I only really travelled by myself to other capital cities and regional centres on weekend visits.

Since then on my own I’ve been to places like Brisbane and south east Queensland as far as Fraser Island, Adelaide and the Barossa Valley, Melbourne and the Great Ocean Road, I lived in Canberra for 4 years while at uni where I took a few random trips here and there, I’ve been to the snowfields at Perisher and Thredbo and Charlotte Pass several times to ski and work (sometimes even when there wasn’t any snow), and I’ve done countless numbers of trips to places not too far from Sydney for lots of different reasons.

Although my first trip outside Australia didn’t arrive until 2003. Through an unexpected and modest family inheritance, my mother suggested a trip to New Zealand, something I’d never really considered or desired to do before, especially not for the cost of travel seeing as far as I was concerned I could do so many things in my own country a whole lot cheaper than flying to any other. I guess I could say the legacy that family member left for me was assisting me in going down a path that would eventually change my life and outlook on the world forever, something I never could’ve seen in myself way back in 2003.